Communications, Computation, Control, and Signal Processing

The traditional systems disciplines of communications, computation, control and signal processing are becoming increasingly important in addressing major technological challenges of the coming century, in fields such as materials processing, manufacturing automation, speech recognition and ubiquitous personal communications, among many others. Moreover the boundaries between these separate disciplines are being rapidly blurred by the many demands of these applications. This Tribute, dedicated to Thomas Kailath for his many seminal contributions to these areas, highlights several recent trends and results, described by leading scientists and engineers from around the world. The thirty-six papers in this volume present important results on, among others, interference cancellation in multipath channels, decision feedback equalization for packet transmission, blind equalization and smart antennas for mobile communications, displacement structure, fast and stable algorithms in numerical linear algebra, nonconvex optimization problems, issues in nanoelectronic computation, fundamental limits of control system performance, LQG control with communication constraints, nonlinear "H"INFINITY control, adaptive nonlinear control, model identification, tomographic deconvolution, and higher-order statistics. The applications discussed herein include packet radio, robotics, very flexible mechanical systems, power systems and power electronics, moving object detection, complexity management and several others. The volume starts out with a survey by Professor Kailath entitled Norbert Wiener and the Development of Mathematical Engineering', a term suggested by Wiener that can serve as a compact description of the variety of fields described herein.